


i dont know anything

by frigate



Category: Taylor Swift - Fandom, Taylor swift Cinematic Universe
Genre: ...but for whom?, And so are the characters in this song!!, Angst, F/F, Fluff, Happy Ending, and im fucking gay, basically betty lives rent free in my head, slight angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28112628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frigate/pseuds/frigate
Summary: The chronicles of three girls told, not by taylor swift, but by meOr the two love great love stories of young (and idiotic) James‘ life
Relationships: betty/james, james/august





	i dont know anything

**Author's Note:**

> Yes! This is indeed a fucking fanfiction about the characters in betty, cardigan, and august! Quarantine is indeed draining the last dregs of dignity from me and i! Don’t! Care! Anyway hope u like what I’ve done with it and uhh obviously my primary motivation for posting this and not letting it languish in the depths of my word files is that sweet sweet validation sooo uhh comments are appreciated and so are kudos thanks have a lovely day

Seventeen is a distinctly lonely age, I find. It’s a prime number. It’s made up of two prime numbers, which makes, really, three prime numbers in one. And prime numbers are nothing if not lonely.   
The loneliness makes for a specific kind of narcissistic ignorance. I write this now, two years later, as though I have learned much, when certainly I haven’t. Certainly I am using this word, certainly, to seem more intelligent, but the truth is that the mistakes I made my seventeenth year are still scared into my consciousness and I do not know if, now, I would choose differently.   
I kissed Betty in the early winter of that year. Very early, in fact: where we live, it does not snow until mid-January at the earliest, and I kissed her weeks before the first flurries fell. It was an impulsive kiss, a stupid one, even, but it worked for us. She has a round, gentle face (as I write this, I can see her tilting it up at me, shining brown eyes and curlicues framing her brow), and a round, gentle body, which snugly fit against my own lanky and angled frame. It happened like this: we were at her house, taking down the last Christmas decor. Her parents were at work, and her baby brother was at daycare, and we were supposed to be at the Prom planning committee, but we’d walked into the Prom Planning Committee Meeting and discovered a stale doughnut and empty chairs, all signs pointing to abandonment, and left.   
“It’s not like,” she ranted to me on the walk to her house, “It’s not like it’s fucking difficult to show up, you know? I mean, we all made a commitment.”  
“A committee commitment,” I agreed, sotto voce, at which she glared at me, nearly clicking her neck with the effort. I enjoyed the glare. There are few things I enjoy more than listening to Betty, but needling her is one of them. The lovely thing, the truly lovely thing about Betty is her rage, you see. I myself am angry nearly constantly, but I am rageful in an unsavory sense of the word. I do not wear the clothes that I am supposed to, I do not do the homework that I am supposed to, I do not care about the things that I am supposed to, and I care far too much about other things, which I am not supposed to. All of this has led to a rather fraught relationship between me and general society which furthermore has led to a significant reservoir of rage.   
Betty’s anger, though, is this: a thousand glaring suns, the wrath of an archangel, the gleaming fury of righteousness. Betty is a far better person than I, and she is still brilliantly, incandescently rageful, and it was this, more than anything else, that drew us together in the first place.  
All this to say, we skipped the stupid fucking meeting. I had my skateboard with me, and she was sitting cross-legged on it as I pushed her along. It was sweetly childish, and I enjoyed it immensely, even with my chapped fingers nearly hitting the gravel every few seconds and my stumbling feet. Betty kept ranting (“And we don’t even have a theme— it’s in four months, what do they expect? And fucking goddamn Mrs. Edwins, terrible name, you know, Jamie, you agree, right? Jamie? and she doens’t even show up, either, and, and I nearly forgot—“) until we reached her door.   
Her house smelled like her, which is to say wonderful and a little bit like oranges. It also smelt of pine.   
Betty groaned as she shoved the door shut behind herself. I nodded in agreement though I didn’t know of what, and she grinned at me, plodding her bag down and wandering to the kitchen. She ate cheez-its by the handful, perched on the countertop, and gave me half from her hand. She fed me one, too, but she didn’t hold my gaze while she did it. Behind us loomed the living room, empty but for a towering Christmas tree and lights still strung around the window. Santa-patterned throws grinned ominously from their perch on the back of the couch.   
I threw myself down on one of these couches. “And what shall we do with our freedom?”  
“Burn everything down,” Betty said between chews. She hung her head over mine, so I was tilted up looking at her gleaming brown eyes. She grinned.  
“Sounds tempting,” I said. My voice was somehow scratched. I thought, maybe it’s the cheez-its. I thought, maybe it’s her.   
She was still staring at me. I thought, goddamn, maybe it is her, and I kissed her before I could stop myself.   
There was nothing more to it than closed, softly chapped lips, but she didn’t pull away. When I did, her eyes were still closed. I sat up and twisted around and took her face in my hands and kissed her, and then she tossed the cheez-it box to the floor and kissed me back.   
I wish I’d given her better than that, something more romantic, something befitting her and her magic gleaming light, but I was never good at self-control and I was never good at denying myself things that I wanted, which seems like the same thing but isn’t really. Not to me, at least. Betty probably would disagree.  
Anyhow. That was the beginning.


End file.
